Transformation in higher education is not about following a rigid model with a fixed endpoint—it’s about adopting a mindset of continuous improvement that adapts to the evolving needs of your students and institution.
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Each institution’s journey is unique
Transformation is a continuous process where an institution considers multiple factors, reflects, and chooses action to address a student success challenge or inequity. At a minimum, leveraging quantitative and qualitative data to analyze, identify, and track student success improvements is fundamental to transformation work.
This routine practice of reflection, prioritization, action, and measurement can be broken into a set of questions. This work – and addressing these questions – benefits from teamwork. Ideally, the team is comprised of both faculty and staff from across the institution, including different functions and roles. Consider the sample questions below as a starting point, to be tailored by each institutional team.
Sample Questions
Aligning on a shared understanding of student success helps your team stay focused and united in driving meaningful change. Explore how to define your “North Star” for student success here: Student Success North Star Activity.
Why continuous improvement matters
Your institution’s commitment to ongoing reflection and action ensures you’re always finding better ways to support students in equitable ways. You create an environment where students can thrive by continuously realigning your structures, culture, and operations.
Continuous improvement is a cyclical, adaptive process that keeps your institution evolving toward better, more equitable outcomes. It begins when you prepare by reviewing student success data and assessing your goals. Next, you reflect with your team, evaluating progress and identifying any gaps. Based on those insights, you prioritize and plan, adjusting your goals and creating actionable strategies. You then act by implementing changes in your initiatives, resources, or processes. Finally, you monitor progress to ensure improvements are sustained, using those insights to inform future adjustments and continue the cycle.
These steps not only guide institutional transformation on a macro level but also serve as a strong framework for mapping out initiatives on a micro level. Phases and activities in your initiative planning often align with this same pattern of improvement.
Engaging cross-functional teams within your institution helps surface challenges and create solutions that lead to meaningful, sustainable transformation. By embedding continuous improvement in your processes, your institution becomes more adaptive, resilient, and focused on equitable student success.
Putting transformation into practice
Transformation in student success begins with a spark—a catalyst for change that can come from within or outside your institution. If you are already a Changemaker, you are well on your way and committed to enhancing student success. To further support your journey, a group of dedicated Changemakers has developed six practical tools designed to embed continuous improvement into your operational routines.
As you explore these tools, remember there is no single pathway to utilizing this toolkit. Depending on where your initiative stands, different entry points may suit your context. Focus on one area of improvement at a time, adapt, and routinize that practice before adding new routines to ensure sustainable change and maximize the impact of your efforts.
Data Use Toolkit
Guide supporting pre-initiative problem exploration, effective data collection and use, and assessment.
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Project Charter Template
Structured document to describe the project, its objectives, why it matters and who’s involved — so everyone’s on the same page.
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Identifying Impact & Value Guide
Guide to investigate and show the impact and value of an initiative to your institution and key stakeholders.
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After Action Review
Reflection tool for recording and leveraging key initiative learnings.
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Team Management Tool
Toolkit to give your initiative the structure and leadership needed through thoughtful consideration of team roles and responsibilities.
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Stakeholder Engagement Toolkit
Identify and engage effectively with those who have a vested interest in or impact on an initiative.
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Maturation through iteration and the development of routines
Sustained, continuous transformation doesn’t happen overnight! It takes practice and good habits, and each institution’s transformation starting point and journey will be unique.
For institutions just getting started on their transformation journey
Transformation champions may be embedded here and there in units across campus, but an institution-wide change narrative may not yet be in the culture. Structures and the business model may remain unchanged, while the routines supporting true transformation may remain unit-based. Institution-wide routines and processes may still only focus on general operations.
For institutions that are further along on their transformation journey
Transformation may have already started, and they are now looking to systematize discrete student success efforts into a campus-wide transformation agenda that connects mission, vision, and strategy. There may already be focus on select student success problems with some shared language and centralized institutional resources that allow cross-functional teams to better align. The change narrative and equity work may have started to take root, and people may be changing their attitudes, beliefs, and values in alignment with equitable transformation. Strategic and cultural changes related to equitable student success may even be impacting budget decisions already.
For institutions that are most mature on their transformation journey
Transformation may have formalized academic and staff structures that are oriented around equitable student success and supporting the institutional business model, which now prioritizes the allocation of finances, time, and physical and human resources to student success work. Equitable student success may be core to the cultural norms of the institution at all levels, and cross-functional teams may regularly engage and involve students in defining problems and solutions. These cross-functional teams may identify barriers to student success by regularly examining data that show loss and momentum points. They may gather at predictable and established times with senior leaders for awareness and accountability. Meanwhile, the mid-level leaders on these teams may continue to meet more frequently with more detailed information to identify, track, and resolve barriers. There may also be institutional structures and processes in place for ensuring accountability both vertically and horizontally.
The ideal state
Sustaining equitable transformation demands purpose and continuous commitment – meaning, there is no finish line to this effort. Institutions will have to develop people and routines that support their own unique, iterative, and integrated approach to continuous improvement on student pathways, student-facing solution areas, and foundational institutional operating capacities. To progress and mature on the transformation journey, institutions will have to repeat the cycle while routinely leveraging quantitative and qualitative data to not only spot and address areas of inequity, but to also evaluate the effectiveness of transformation efforts thus far. As student needs and institutional contexts and resources shift, leaders may find themselves catalyzed to begin additional transformation journeys, either widening or narrowing the aperture of the initial route and itinerary.
